918 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 





When our feast was finished I strolled 

 down the stream to see how the fish were 

 affected below the pool. Many of the 

 very smallest of them floated by, appar- 

 ently dead, and I was told that they 

 would not recover, but make food for the 

 larger ones, who were not affected by 

 eating them. To all appearance they 

 were affected only through their respira- 

 tory organs, and experience no lasting 

 injury. With the exception of an occa- 

 sional flash of white belly, which disap- 

 peared as quickly as it came in sight, the 

 larger fish, such as we had taken out, 

 when they had reached the diluted poison 

 of the stream below, were not at all 

 affected. 



After we all, men, women, and chil- 

 dren, had smoked one of their cigarettes, 

 rolled in pungent cascara bark instead of 

 paper, I went home alone, less mystified 

 by the barbasco fishing than by the in- 

 herited capacity of this ancient race, to 

 enjoy a whole week, with nothing to 

 think about, and nothing to do, but eat, 

 sleep, and smoke. 



HOW /THE UNTUTORED SAVAGES KEPT A 

 TRIBE-SECRET 400 YEARS 



"Urari (or Curari) is the most power- 

 ful sedative in nature ; tipped with it, 

 the needle-like arrows used by the In- 

 dians of the upper Amazon, in their 

 blow-guns, will kill an ox in twenty min- 

 utes and a monkey in ten." 



This is substantially the statement 

 made by Prof. James Orton, A. M., in 

 his volume "The Andes and the Ama- 

 zons." The fact that the secret of com- 

 pounding this unique poison has been 

 kept so long from its numberless seekers 

 is perhaps the strangest thing about it. 



The first mention of it made to the 

 civilized world was by Orellana in his ac- 

 count of his descent of the "Great River" 

 when he deserted, with a portion of the 

 men, from the conquering army of Fran- 

 cisco Pizarro and sailed down to the At- 

 lantic Ocean in 1539. Pie wrote that his 

 company was "fired upon by the hostile 

 Indians with minute, poisoned arrows." 

 This is the same trip when he reported 

 that he was attacked by a band of savage 



female warriors with bows and arrows. 

 His report of the poisoned arrows has 

 been verified by later travelers, although 

 the "female warriors," from whom the 

 mighty river derived its name, proved to 

 be a shiftless tribe of savages, too lazy 

 to make other garments, who wore in the 

 place of clothes a sheet of thin bark with 

 a hole in the middle to slip over the head, 

 after which it was belted at the waist, 

 and was easily mistaken for a woman's 

 dress. The same costume is still worn 

 by them. 



The great traveler and naturalist, 

 Baron Von Humboldt, in 1803, was the 

 first to bring to Europe a sufficient quan- 

 tity of the poison for analysis. It was 

 found to contain a hitherto unknown 

 alkaloid, which was named curarine. 



Urari is prepared by only a few tribes 

 of savages on the upper waters of the 

 Amazon and Orinoco rivers, where it is 

 almost the only article made for sale. 

 It is sold mostly to other tribes, who use 

 it for killing birds whose plumage has 

 been in great demand in late years among 

 the river traders. 



The price of urari, where it is made, is 

 quite uniformly its weight in silver. In 

 Quito, where considerable is marketed, a 

 one-half gill cup of it costs $1.50. 



The gun in which these poisoned ar- 

 rows are used consists of a straight 

 bamboo tube, from five to six feet long, 

 with a sight on one end and a funnel- 

 shaped expansion to fit the mouth at the 

 other. The principle is precisely the 

 same as a schoolboy's tube for blowing 

 putty-balls, but the bore is so large, about 

 one-half inch, that it requires more 

 breath than untrained lungs can supply 

 to make it effective. Even the most ex- 

 pert can shoot only a short distance, as 

 compared with firearms, but their accu- 

 racy is wonderful when one considers 

 the difficulty of sighting a tube from the 

 position in which it is held. 



The arrows consist of a point of wood 

 or bone, not more than an inch long, 

 and the size of a toothpick, to which is 

 attached a little tuft of the airy fiber of 

 the silk cotton tree, which is as light as 

 thistle-down, and will not "pack" like 



